Welcome to the new space economy - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Welcome to the new space economy - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Welcome to the new space economy

In this issue: Printing human knees in space iPhone 25: made on the moon! The accidental $20 billion miracle drug Three Mile Island is back Matt Ridley’s crystal ball

Hi Rational Optimist Society member,   Thanks for the big response to last week’s issue. A lot of you are really excited about space tech and the nuclear revival. Me too!   Let’s talk space today. Wait until you see the breakthroughs happening right now, and how they intersect with biotech. This stuff should be front-page news.   I'm reading Liftoff, a book about the early days of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. If you want to be inspired, pick up a copy.   Before Musk was a billionaire, he almost went broke. Several times. His closest brush with bankruptcy was due to SpaceX. He personally invested $100 million. Its first three rockets failed, exploding into million-dollar fireworks. Elon had to borrow money to pay rent.   Here’s Musk staring at a pile of twisted metal from a failed launch:

How am I gonna pay rent?   Today, “just” 22 years later, SpaceX is worth $210 billion. It’s the world’s most valuable private company. Last month, it achieved the first-ever private spacewalk. Here’s a SpaceX astronaut gazing down at Earth:

Does it get more inspirational than this?   Imagine a giant floating laboratory, bigger than a football field, zooming around Earth every 90 minutes. That's the International Space Station (ISS). It has flourished into a bustling factory for groundbreaking medical research that can’t be conducted on Earth.   Researchers aboard the ISS successfully 3D printed the first human knee meniscus (!) last year. Redwire (public: RDW), which owns the BioFabrication lab on the ISS, then sent the meniscus back to Earth aboard a SpaceX rocket.   Why do this in space? In a word, microgravity. Try to make a soft, squishy organ like a human liver on earth. It'll collapse under its own weight like a failed soufflé. No problem in space, where everything is near-weightless.   Right now, 250 miles above our heads, innovation specialists at Airbus are growing mini hearts, livers, and kidneys in space.   Need a new liver? In the not-too-distant future, we'll upload your unique cell samples, use them to print a perfect match in space, and then gently ship your new liver back to Earth.   Microgravity is a game changer for drug development too. Drug particles made on Earth often end up like mixed nuts, all different shapes and sizes. In microgravity, drug molecules can be formed like perfectly round marbles.   For cancer patients, this isn't just a fun fact. Better drugs are life-changing. They’re the difference between spending hours hooked up to an IV drip vs. swallowing a space-made pill at home.   Most major pharma companies already make drugs on the ISS. Last year, the floating lab hosted 500 projects. Merck tested Keytruda in space, a cancer immunotherapy that’s now one of the world’s best-selling drugs.    Progress is happening here fast. Startup Varda (private) recently launched the world's first space-based drug factory. Varda’s capsule hitched a ride on a SpaceX rocket, made some pills in orbit, and then parachuted back to Earth.   Notice every story above involves SpaceX. SpaceX has made the new space economy possible by reducing the cost of rocket launches by 98%.   Imagine if every time you flew, the airline had to build a new plane? Flying from London to NYC would cost $1 million. That's how reaching space used to work.   SpaceX changed the game by pioneering reusable rockets that land themselves after launch, ready for the next trip. In 2000, launching something into space cost as much as $73,000/kg. SpaceX slashed this by 98% to $1,200/kg. Musk is targeting $10/kg!   Don’t underestimate the impact of reducing costs. It’s often how new industries are born. Varda, for example, was never a viable business because it would’ve cost $20 million+ to send its 660lb mini drug factory into orbit 20 years ago. SpaceX delivered it into space for less than $2 million.   Imagine all the Vardas that will be built because we can now get to space for cheap. The iPhone gave us Uber, Netflix, and Facebook. What trillion-dollar ideas will cheap space travel spawn?   SpaceX is essentially running a cosmic taxi. It has launched 11 rockets in the past month alone. Booking a trip to orbit is almost as easy as preordering an Uber.   Seriously. Try it. Visit SpaceX's website, type in the weight of your “parcel” and when you want to send it. You’ll get an instant quote. I see the future.   Thanks to SpaceX, more objects reached space in the past two years than in all of previous history. SpaceX accounts for 95%+ of these launches.

Source: Our World in Data   Where’s this all going? Here’s a prediction: Your iPhone 25 will be made on the moon. Don’t laugh.   The “switches” on the chip inside your iPhone are so tiny that 20,000 of them fit on the width of a human hair. They can only be manufactured in an extremely clean environment. A single speck of dust ruins them. Today, we deal with this by building $20 billion factories with state-of-the-art air filtration systems.   Mother Nature provides “clean rooms” for free in space. It's a near-perfect vacuum, no air, no dust. And it's cold, with temperatures dipping as low as -65 degrees. That's great for chips, which generate enough heat to fry an egg when they're working hard.   The moon could become the Silicon Valley of space. Imagine chipmakers setting up shop next to where Neil Armstrong planted the American flag.   One day, we'll look back and laugh that humans had to make everything on Earth.    “We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” That was JFK in 1962. America put a man on the moon seven years later.   Optimism is contagious. It spreads from person to person, lighting up imaginations and firing up ambitions like a chain reaction.   The next time you look up at the night sky, remember you're not just stargazing. You're looking at the factories and workshops of the future. The cure for cancer might take shape up there.